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The students being lectured in Ostenso's wizard academy, in their third year, can be divided into three rough groups.
In the first group are those whose central goal in wizard academy can be summed up with the word "survival"; they have been wizard-tracked and sent here will-they-nil-they, and now they need to get through with their lives intact and as much of their sanity left as possible. If they make it to graduation as second-circles they will be, for the most part, sent to the Worldwound for a tour of duty holding back endless demon hordes, and if they make it through three years there, they will be permitted to embark on a civilian life, as third-circles if they are lucky. You can live a good life that way so long as nobody notices you. Eventually, of course, you will go to Hell, because among the mandatory sessions at Ostenso's wizard academy are putting into actual practice your deadly spells on stupid or crippled children with no other uses; the cleric students at the neighboring temple need subjects on which to practice healing, after all; also, everybody in Cheliax seems weirdly likely to end up in Hell for some reason, no matter what else they do with their lives. If you're still first-circle by the time graduation rolls around, then you get posted as a government wizard someplace you won't get much of a chance at combat, possibly at a tiny town out in the middle of farmlands, and you'll be a long time paying back the debt you owe Cheliax for the magical education that it graciously gave you. (If you haven't made first-circle at all by the end of your second year, you are now a laundry wizard posted to some even tinier farming village, and the debt you owe the academy is probably going to last the rest of your life.)
Students in this first group do their homework, keep their heads down, try desperately to score high enough on exams that they won't be among the bottom third of students whom the top tenth of students get to punish, and engage in political maneuvering only insofar as is required to keep down their losses from other people's maneuvering.
In the second group are the ambitious, though few of them have any ambition. They can't realistically just try harder at their lessons than the survivors, because in both cases you must try quite hard to compete against other people trying quite hard not to end up in the punishment bracket. They can try to pick out the smarter survivors and force those into giving them free lessons, maybe with the appearance of protecting them against some other threat if they're hoping for more pretended gratitude. They are swifter to answer in class even when grades don't depend on it, they try to come to the attention of teachers and look like good prospects for mentoring, they extort things they want from other students so that they will look like good Asmodeans and not just passable ones when the loyalty mindscans come around.
Students in this second group are a bit underrepresented, by the time the third year of academics have come around; some of those who take risks fail, and flunk or get expelled or die.
The third group consists of Pilar Pineda, who is way too much of a masochist to be scared of any standard punishment the academy offers; though she tries very hard to be whatever the teachers proclaim to be good, because that is what a good Asmodean would do, and Pilar Pineda's faith in Asmodeus is invincible. She Prestidigitates her hair a bright attention-attracting pink, and often goes around saying what's actually on her mind, in both cases apparently in the belief that nothing she considers bad can ever realistically happen to her, not in Cheliax; in the worst case she dies and goes to Hell and who wouldn't want to go there? You would expect this person to be an absolute total bastard and one of the scariest students in the academy, and not only is Pilar weirdly not that, she's the most likely person in the class to offer to trade tutoring to a struggling lesser student, in exchange for what Pilar will in all blank-faced Asmodean ominousness tell you is a 'favor' to be called in later. Pilar sure must have some ambitious plans rolling there, for the last months of her education; because graduation is approaching and she's accumulated a lot of favors not called in. Anybody else would be worried about passing their loyalty scans.
In one particular Ostensan classroom, about a dozen-and-a-half students are arrayed in three concentric circles of desks, listening to a cold-faced lecturer try to explain the necessary folds and twists to scaffold and hang Protection From Chaos. Around half the students there have succeeded in making good progress on halfway hanging the spell off the standardized spellbook-pages provided them, and the other half of students are sinkingly afraid from the increasingly cold-faced expression of the lecturer that this is going to be a case where more than just the worst performers get punished for falling behind. They go on trying to scaffold and hang the spell anyways, and don't let their fear make their fingers tremble; anyone who couldn't handle that much pressure failed out before the end of their first year.
